EARTHRISE DIARY (April 2011)

EARTHRISE DIARY (APRIL 2011)

One of the beauties of the forests, I always thought but never wrote about nor have I read about, was the complete little gardens springing out of fallen trees that have been lying in the forest for years and have rotted sufficiently to be covered with moss and forest flowers, ferns and young trees which will, no doubt as the years pass by, replace the fallen giant on which they started their life, the fir or pine cones having probably been blown there by the winds or carried there by squirrels, mice or other forest dwellers.

Durbyn Diespecker: Durban, Natal, writing in the 1960s of Cowichan, BC between 1908 and 1914 and between 1925 and 1937.

This has been quite a weekend. The gathering yesterday was a huge success. There were 7 children, 2 babies and 10 adults! The weather was sunny and cool; perfect for the Easter egg hunt we held out on the trail leading into the woods at the back of our complex. Natalie got all the eggs organized: inside plastic eggs with each child's name. There were 2 per child. Signe and I went out a little earlier and hid them under leaves, branches etc. The children had a wonderful hunt! We have a good- sized pool and jacuzzi downstairs so swimming was a big attraction also. We all fit in the apartment too (under 1000sq.ft.), for food, present-opening and birthday cake time and we were definitely cozy! The hours I suggested were 3-7. Everyone was still here at 8:30! Brian and I were still cleaning up at 10pm but it was well worth every dirty plate!

Jill Alexander: Vancouver, BC, April 26 2011

The days are steadily growing cooler. Most evenings see the valley fill with a blanket of smoke: a mix of chimney and autumn backyard burn-offs. There has also been some burning off of the forest logging coups in the state forests that lie to the southeast of Warburton. Symon and I went exploring in an old four-wheel drive that we have into the hills where the Mountain Correa grows, and where there are also large stands of re-growth timber. We also happened upon a recently clear-felled area of forest, which wasn't re-growth. This had us lamenting for the Correa's that once were living there, as well as the many Mountain Ash that had been felled. Some of these giants (although burnt and dead) remained standing, many metres high, their straight trunks were black and atop they still held a mass of foliage that had turned from green to brown. I collected some charcoal from the ground and plan to make some drawings of the trees and plants of that area with it.

Petra Meer: Warburton, VIC, April 26 2011

I begin with a few words by my late father (1896-1977) who traveled to Canada with his family in 1908 when he was 12-years old and I also tend to think of flowers at Easter because now it’s springtime in British Columbia where I was born and where we lived until 1937 when I was eight years old. Also, I remember childhood Easters with pleasure and affection: there were Easter bunnies and chocolates of course and one year the rabbits were real: I had to follow a string that led me to them; one was light brown and we named it Sandy. While it’s in my mind I recall another of Durbyn’s descriptions in his unpublished memoir: a mention of clear-felled forest long ago on Vancouver Island before I was born. Forests all over the world are still being destroyed.

There isn’t much colour in the garden at Earthrise this month because of the all too frequent rain—but there is some. This part of the world is green and gold most of the year, but there are native white cedars that now are grey and mossy in the wet air after losing their leaves and there are other non-native deciduous trees like liquidambar that change their colours.

Although Easter here is also school vacation time, the neighbourhood where I am has been surprisingly quiet this year, possibly because of the variable weather and the disasters this past summer in Queensland and the rising cost(s) of living. At this time of year the sun dips westward quite early in the day and my big trees cast long shadows across the river and the stone beaches on that Left Bank, but the sunny parts still attract locals and visitors to sit in family groups to chat, or to swim or fish or kayak and also to swish through the rapids in front of the house in the embrace of big truck tire inner tubes. Old memories of the tubes we used in the 1930s on the Cowichan (Vancouver Island) are still clear and when I see the kids here on the Bellinger I also visualize myself being encouraged by my father and my late sister, Deirdre, to enjoy the experience. The Cowichan is a river much like the Bellinger, but although the Canadian river was shallow near the rapids I was wary of the fast water. There was a clean white rocky beach, but with some green algae or weed on those stones that were in the water: to me the algae had a sinister look.

April 25. My overheated mind would benefit from cooling a little because some of the wet weather has been interrupted by bursts of dry sunny weather (perfect for musing and reading outside). There has been a mind-spinning and tiring search for hard to find and misplaced papers in my crowded archives; I’ve completed reading Anna Karenina and have started The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; some garden work has been rewarding (clearing re-growth trees behind the house); and the email traffic from all parts has further diverted my mind on variable and wobbly courses. How simple it is to write notes to oneself and to prioritize tasks and objectives and how maddeningly difficult to follow directions and how easy it is to fall out of calm meditative processes and into frantic adventures between summery and stormy weather: I’m nowadays in the middle of everything, as my teacher, Erving Polster, used to say. And my retirement is always busy and crowded.

April 24. Earlier in the month I made false starts to this Diary with further copious notes about the January ‘near flood’ and had even noted a quotation that reminded me of difficult times with the local Council here. I’ll write about something more acceptable: the garden here; my views from the garden; the garden as a place of simple beauty. –And, how easily the natural world may compel thinking (mine, anyway).

As one of my rituals I often walk down to the Lawn each morning, sometimes with a mug of tea, just to have a general look round: today the river is still uncomfortably narrow and big having been pinched in January’s high rise of the river, the water rushing by rather than casually flowing and looking like pale green molten metal.

Walking down to the belvedere recently I was reminded of a near meeting a few days ago. I had almost walked into a big fat red-bellied black snake because I’d been mowing and was strolling toward the downstream view of the river when I was distracted by swimmers coming upstream: the plump snake flowed easily away from me, over the edge and through the riverbank’s undergrowth like shining liquorice.

Sometimes the ritual walk takes me as far as the remains of an old gate set against the ancient riverbank (where Darkwood Road cuts through the bank and where high floods sometimes enter here from across the Deer Park opposite) and return with one of the half buried stones I’d used there about 25 years ago to make a small wall and carry it all the way to the new Riverside Lawn where stone by stone a new anti-flood wall rises. Everything changes.

When I walk down to the Lawn on a dry morning these days there are occasional flurries of small yellow leaves falling although there’s no breeze. I used to think this odd until I heard a reasoned explanation on ABC Radio National: some leaves (like the white cedar leaves here) are consciously, if you like, let go by the tree when the tree is ready to let them go: simultaneously releasing those that have completed their purpose is an efficiency.

Dry vs Wet Gardening. On the one hand dry gardening is always hot work, even in autumn and winter and it’s autumn here now so that the temptation is to sit appreciatively, enjoying the ambience and merely thinking of gardening. It’s too late to cull the rampant Queensland grass because these plants are all seeding—again. I look reflectively at the luxuriant swells of tradescantia on all sides and smile thinly. If I could somehow turn this colonizing monstrosity into something positive I would celebrate. I’m reminded of Kew Gardens in the UK: visitors would be attracted from all quarters; at Earthrise world travellers would see tradescantia at its utmost best and realize how generously it combines with other groundcovers to influence anything that looks like a garden. The legendary Earthrise tradescantia would become thematic in stories (The Tradescantia Diaries; The Tradescantia Cipher; L’Affaire Tradescantia) and I would make serendipitous discoveries about its health-promoting qualities: Tradescantia au gratin… Perhaps not: if you could see what damage groundcovers may do when they set their mass green minds to it you would be appalled.

And as for Wet Gardening: forget it. Boots will be muddied and the devoted gardener will be too wet and tired to clean his boots well enough to stagger around the house so the house will be muddied, the gardener irate and the time outside will be undervalued and wasted.

There are two protected mini-gardens two metres from where I sit, each filled with Lime Glow and Mrs Rees dahlias and in recent days the bigger than usual bright flowers of Lime Glow have attracted butterflies, but I don’t know why. One of the butterflies is a drab grey-brown and has enlivening bars of yellow, like the yellow of the dahlia, one on each wing. This flier is attracted either by a pheromone that I can’t detect or by something visual (nectar gleaming?) though not visible to me (surely mating isn’t in either the butterfly’s mind or that of the flower?). It makes repeated visits to the same flower, circling, settling then again resuming circuits. It sometimes inspects but does not explore Mrs Rees’s scarlet blooms, a distraction that interrupts my reading. I have also seen smaller variants of this butterfly that sport not yellow bars but blobby roundels on the wings—and one of them settled on my arm so I could get a good look at it. I would like to understand the significance of this butterfly and its likely metaphorical meaning, but I may need a lepidopterist.

I see that the rich mix of lawn grasses (mostly delivered here as gifts of the flooding river) and groundcovers is dry enough to mow and I soon bring the mower down to lawn level, clean the spark plug, tighten the connections, adjust everything, and—away we go again: summer mowing on autumn days, the exhaust fumes getting up my nose to further wear down my brain and lulling me into repetitive circuits so that I cut in ever-widening circles until Big Lawn begins to emerge in all its bumptious glory. When I stop to empty the cuttings or to refuel, I can smell the fragrance of cut grasses and groundcovers and am reminded of my father cutting grass at 1129 Oxford Street (Victoria, BC, Canada) in the 1930s with a maddening barrel-bladed push mower, and so remember the time I slaughtered a mob of harmless garter snakes on that old Canadian lawn… Dad was displeased. And how had I, aged about four, come to understand serpents as threatening and deserving of death by a Big Stick?

On Easter Monday afternoon, there are long sunny periods and the weather is blissfully dry. On the lawn at this low level the house away to my right (south) is metres higher than I am but the distance allows me to see the tops of more distant trees; the trees nearby are too big and too high for me to see adequately. Imagine being a baby photographer sitting on the floor with a good camera and taking a picture: the picture might show only the legs of the people around you. With big trees (40-, 50-m and even higher) you absolutely cannot see all of any one tree without damaging your neck: a case of being too close to the wood, ha ha, to see the trees. There is a consolation on sunny days, however: the smooth creamy white trunks of the big flooded gums will display shadowgraphs of more distant trees to the west: a shadow show for one’s mind, and late in the afternoon you may watch these lightly moving shadow pictures while listening to the trilling of honeyeaters (they perhaps watch the picture show, too).

I settle again to see what I can. Close encounters with the mighty midges, gnats and mozzies increase in frequency. An impressively beautiful tiny midge (and only midges) will sometimes settle on a page while I read: they have marvellous aerodynamic shapes; each always appears to be examining a page. Why do they visit and inspect printed pages? There are butterflies: white ones, black and white ones, ones multicoloured…but those at the lowest altitudes are nowhere near me down here on the grass: they’re all Up There, at least 3-m above the lawn. Most of the butterflies dash about at higher altitudes in a realm10-m to about 35-m up. I don’t know why, although I can see some very rapid butterfly flying by a vigorous pair dodging and weaving at high speed, bobbing and zooming in human terms, so I assume some of that may be courting behaviour and if it is: the little fliers have been smart enough these past few days to become well-hatched, able aeronauts, primed to fly for their short lives in as zesty a fashion as they possibly can. These short periods of relatively dry weather in what has been a monstrously wet summer and early autumn are clearly perfect for all of this unexpected butterfly activity.

In order to see the aeronautics I must get my head up, well up, and so I start to think about how strangely we limit our seeing to the lower levels, and so miss almost everything that transpires well above us. To see up I need better physiology: a neck and spine having a universal joint or two, and while I think of it, a neck that would enable me to also see backwards over the top of my head, or better still, one allowing me to swivel maybe 300˚ or more. Humans have big brains but we maintain our visual fields low down, so we miss a lot. Were we less downcast we would see a lot more life above our heads when entering forests. Further up, where the nonlocal trees struggle upward for light, the West African tulip tree is shedding its orange cup-sized flowers on the grass about 40-m below. Directly ahead of me an old white cedar threatens to shed some of its big branches on me, but I’ve been lucky so far. Clumps of stag horn and elk-horn are growing about 20-m up on those remarkably strong branches. Below this big tree there’s my one and only calamondin (or cumquat, if you use the popular name, and from the Philippines rather than from China). I remember that I regularly would pick the little orange fruits and make some marmalade each May, but it seems too time-consuming these days. I planted the tree, now much pruned and well past its productive best, about 25 years ago: it’s fruiting again now. Between where I sit and these trees the grass is drying after morning showers. Some native violets are a pale blue and white in the grass, together with pink clover flowers and some tiny white three-petal flowers that seem to grow only among the varied grasses. Behind me on the mowed lawn and in the Dog’s Garden the last of the dahlia flowers are soggy and drooping and on the far side of that garden there is the surprising emerald green of an enlarging area of bright moss that doesn’t like being mowed but which is presently growing and spreading prolifically because of the wet. Remarkably, when the winter turns to spring, this yearly green moss will begin diminishing and then disappear completely as the lawn starts to dry out. Although I don’t remember green carpets in Iran my mind enables a flickering little image for me of newly-made carpets laid out in the streets in Iranian towns so that the passing traffic would impress on them a more used look, a look of experience perhaps, and so allow dustiness and wear to be more marketable. And as I dreamily keep my eyes on the grass circles I’ve mown around the Dog’s Garden I start to recall some of the descriptions of scything meadows in Anna Karenina. I learned from Tolstoy (and his translators) how a big filed or meadow is cut by muzhiks. (I have several times in the past considered buying a Big Reaper scythe to use here, but I’m told that learning to handle one efficiently isn’t all that easy). When I walked to school (Sir James Douglas School) from Oxford Street (Victoria, BC) in the 1930s there was a vacant corner lot that I passed and in the warmer months an old man used to cut the grass there with a big scythe; I can never forget him. Now I remember that along that same route I sometimes would walk home from school with Louise Dale or possibly Dayle (sp?) and used to carry her satchel…once I went all the way home with her and met her mother…Louise was a member of that family who owned the Dales Chickens business. We were about 6 or 7 years old, then.

I’ll mention a couple of other Close Encounters: one was with a very small water dragon, sunning himself on the warm stones that support the belvedere one afternoon: he or she played dead when I offered a gentle stroking of the head and spine. These tiny dinosaurs have the most elegant feet (or hands, if you like): they put me in mind of Rachmaninoff who had great hands.

There are associations everywhere in the garden.

And on several recent occasions while musing and dozing in bed late at night an inquisitive bat has manifested inside the house to make low-level passes, his or her wings politely brushing my cheek, reminding me of those old vampire movies. S-he has excellent avionics so it may be some time before I can defeat the invader.

Although it’s a little late in the month now I wish you all a Happy and safe Easter. DDD. April 28 2011.